If you are handed a coup, a plot, a bomb, a war, a revolution, is it yours? Can anyone else revolt for your freedom? I hear more often than not about soldiers dying overseas for my rights and freedom. Strangely, this never makes me more free. Strangely, it never seems to make me more free. Perhaps I merely need to go there myself. But where? I cannot imagine that just running off anywhere will make me more free. So I line up and wait for orders and someone tells me where to die. Again, I cannot imagine this makes me more free.

What am I to do, attack the nearest intrument of oppression? That would be the next person I meet, beside myself of course. And again, I cannot imagine that attacking someone in the same position as me is going to make either of us more free. It's more likely to get at least one ulof us in jail.

I cast a vote. Several. I've even done it more than once. Strangely, I do not feel more free. Perhaps that's merely asking someone else to stage the revolution for me. "Excuse me, sir, might I be more free in a few months time?" False revolutionaries in revolving doors.

I'm beginning to think that humans are not naturally free and perhaps freedom is never even possible. Not since we lost the ability to kill tigers with little more than rocks. Which is to say, never. Even then we worked together. Cooperation is such a lovely word. So I'm led to only this: choose your tyrant carefully, for if you do not pick one, then it will be chosen for you. And my question is left unanswered.

I stopped voting exactly because of this feeling. Because it didn't really matter what I voted for, or for whom, things would stay pretty much the same. I just want to be left alone, and you know, for the most part I am left alone!

I live in a country where there is very little danger comparitively, I can walk outside at any time of day or night and feel relatively safe. Can't say that for a lot of places. Can't say that for about 2/3 of the planet. I'm safe because the community around me has found a broad set of rules that help keep the majority of us safe. You are upset that you are imprisoned for commiting assault, yet our military is praised for the same process? Your assault would occur within your community where you would be infringing on someone else's freedom and feeling of safety; therefore removing you from that community is for the 'greater good'. Our military (U.S.) has gone out at the request of another sovereign nation in regards to attaining this same sense of 'community' that we enjoy. Their 'assaults' are done in an effort to extend this feeling of community to another people, and at the request of said people.

I'm resigned to the fact that portions of my life are in control of other people. But, if I get left to my own devices 80% of the time, that's pretty fantastic to me! I choose where to work, what school to go to, what career to pursue, and depending how hard I work my own level of success. If I learn the rules of the game to a 'T', and work really hard I can be hugely successful, as many many people before me have become.

Hell, if I followed that mantra in Warcraft, I'd have a whole lot more than 600g in the bank and 1 level 80 after 15 months... But, I know it to be true.

@Anonymous: Yes, I suppose not being in jail is better than being in jail, but I'm still not seeing what you're getting at.

@Ephemeron: That's certainly true. But there's the cost calculation to be made. Wars inevitably reduce freedom back home as we pay taxes (though money and freedom are as exactly linked as many seem to think) for them and are pressured to get in line to blindly support our glorious leader. So the freedom protected by the war must offset the freedom lost by waging the war. Unfortunately we've been in the negative for quite some time now.